Cabinet Office spends £5.5m in a month on Brexit consultants

One government department alone spent £5.5m in a single month on management consultants to help with Brexit policy, it has emerged. Labour analysed government data on all spending of £25,000 or more by the Cabinet Office in January, the last month for which figures have been released, and calculated that the amount spent on external consultants for Brexit-related work was £6m. The Cabinet Office said just over £400,000 of this was spent not on consultants but by a media buying company to purchase advertising space for the government’s Brexit-related public information campaign. It said the £5.5m, which primarily went to multinational companies including EY, PwC and Bain, covered necessary extra skills for Brexit-related tasks such as operational and project management tasks. The monthly cost was expected to increase as the Brexit process accelerated, the department said.